Sadly, Medea Benjamin left her vagina costume at home.
CODEPINK Snow Day at the Department of Homeland Security – Medea Benjamin and Alli McCracken
… He told us he had agreed to meet because he had seen CODEPINK “express our views in a variety of creative ways”–from his home to Congressional hearings to Medea’s disruption of President Obama’s speech in May of 2013. He said he believes in open dialogue and thought it would be good to hear us out.
We spent the next 40 minutes talking about our concerns. Alli opened the meeting by telling the Secretary that the drone program that he legally sanctioned continues to kill innocent people abroad, including the targeting of a wedding party in Yemen in December. She told him about CODEPINK trips to Pakistan and Yemen, where we’ve met with innocent drone strike survivors who have related their harrowing stories and pointed out that there has yet to be any apology or compensation for the victims.
Tighe and Medea talked about the domestic use of drones. They asked why DHS is giving grants to police departments across the country to buy drones when there aren’t any regulations in place for their use and why drones along the border are being illegally lent to law enforcement agencies. They expressed the concern of civil liberties’ groups throughout the country about the invasion of our privacy that will come when our airspace is totally opened up to drones in the next year or two, and how DHS seems to be working with the drone industry to help them increase sales. Medea gave him a copy of her book Drone Warfare, which he asked her to autograph.
Then we moved into the immigration issues, with Catalina giving a moving testimony about the struggles of life in America as an undocumented person. “I’m an ‘illegal alien,’ that’s how you refer to us in all your documents, right?” she asked him. “Well you are meeting one in person right now. Have you met with people going through detention and deportation? Have you met with the families of those who are being deported? You talk about conducting a review to make immigration enforcement more ‘humane,’ but let me tell you that there is nothing humane about enforcement, even from the way you refer to us, as aliens, not even humans. There is nothing humane about drones at the border, a border patrol that is out of control, or operation streamline. There is nothing humane about putting someone in deportation proceedings, then locking them up in a cage, away from their families and any support system, making it almost impossible to get legal counsel, without any due process rights, in horrible conditions, and then deporting them. There is nothing humane about that.”
She went on to suggest specific detention centers that the Secretary should visit to see the horrid conditions that people are kept in. When asked if DHS is lobbied by special interest groups like GEO, one of the largest private companies running detention centers for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the DHS), he acted like he didn’t know what GEO was.
Should the head of DHS really be meeting with people who pull stunts like this?
